Bashar al-Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron fist for 24 years before getting his comeuppance, received silent support from one of the unlikeliest places during his dictatorial rule. Numerous groups in Turkey’s splintered Left, from self-professed Maoists to Stalin …
The triumph of Gisèle Pelicot
In the end, Time magazine named Donald Trump 2024’s Person of the Year. Predictable, perhaps — but also ironic, in that Trump’s claim to that title rests on his power to represent an aggregate of people. He is Person of …
Why I’m leaving the UK
The United Kingdom is a totalitarian hellscape. Freedom of speech has been all but abolished. Our police forces are now indistinguishable from the Gestapo. Criticism of the government will soon be illegal under imminent laws against thought crime. It will …
Is Britain sleepwalking into war?
The collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria has not changed the balance of power in the war between Russia and Ukraine. There is no doubt that the Ukraine war, after the deaths of hundreds of thousands, will end through negotiations, …
Colombia is doomed by corruption
I owe my functioning right hand to the business acumen of Pablo Escobar.
That claim might — indirectly — almost be true. Seven years ago, during a paddle in a jungle pool in the province of Guaviare in Colombia, I …
The politicians lying about Syria
Old grievances in Western politics have been reopened by the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And they are as dispiriting in their dishonesty as they are myopic in their self-interest. On the one hand, we have the unrepentant interventionists …
Joe Biden’s pardons are a moral surrender
Compartmentalised people are difficult enough to deal with. A compartmentalised culture sleepwalks toward oblivion.
Consider New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who wrote in December 2017, not even a year into Trump’s presidency: “As this hideous, discombobulating year comes to …
The sanctions-busters funding Iran
Donald Trump isn’t yet back in the White House — but his Iranian policy is clear. Like he did in his first term, he’ll pursue a vigorous policy against Tehran, hampering its nuclear programme and backing its rivals across the …
The return of Muscular Christianity
Rhea Graham is not your average content creator. With a powerful physique and a penchant for heavy lifting, she looks every inch the fitness influencer. Yet her page isn’t quite what you’d expect from someone who bench presses 55 kilos …
How Syria will shape Europe’s future
War is of its nature an uncertain business. Only in retrospect does Assad’s fall, so improbable last week, now look fated. It is ironic, given the opprobrium with which Arab normalisation with his regime was greeted by pro-rebel advocates, that …
The private police patrolling London
One golden autumn afternoon, in a quiet North London suburb, I stumbled across a portal to a possible English future. Hadley Wood sits on the fringes of the city, between Barnet and the M25, seemingly forgotten in its own little …
The truth about the Woke Right
The feminist writer Audre Lorde famously observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She was wrong, though. Sometimes appropriating the master’s tools can come in very handy. Already accustomed to the sound of falling masonry, onlookers …
Syria has spooked MBS
The flight of Bashar al-Assad and his family to Russia, where they have been granted asylum, indicates that however ruthless his style of governing by murder, torture and repression, he is not an ideologist. Instead of remaining defiantly in Syria …
Is Bernie Sanders going MAGA?
Bernie Sanders has been anything but quiet in the weeks since the Democrats’ defeat on 5 November, issuing stinging criticisms of the party with which he is only functionally affiliated as an independent. But recent days have seen even more …
How the internet perverts desire
Romantic love, one of the great organising forces in Western societies, is in crisis. Just look at the low fertility rates, and correspondingly high rates of singleness and sexlessness, in the contemporary West.
Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for …